How to become a fractional CTO?

How do you become a fractional CTO / CEO / C-level anything?

I'm not offering shortcuts, but rather a clear, actionable list of the top 3 things you should start doing today to make a career as a fractional:

1. Build your reputation

Word of mouth will be your first source of clients, so if you can provide a great service - people will refer others to you. This won't be enough to get you to £1m ARR, but it's a start (and scaling it is a completely different story, which I'll discuss separately).

Ask for reviews after every consulting session that went well. Collect all your reviews in a single place, and share them on your portfolio website.

Personally, I found Senja to work very well for me, as I can request people to leave either written or recorded feedback from the admin dashboard there:

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2. Free sessions

I've seen fractional CTOs with 0 actual experience (as fractionals), charging £500+ per hour.Why would anybody pay that? Unless you're a niche specialist in COBOL systems from the 20th century, there's absolutely no reason anybody would pay you that, especially when you're just starting out. I've given countless sessions for free, and it works wonders to build that initial base that will later refer clients to you, and will provide you with references.

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3. Content

Nobody knows who you are unless you're telling people who you are. I have good content and I have bad content - quite honestly I'm still figuring this out, but it's definitely something you have to invest in proactively in order to grow your audience and potential client base. Post a diary, post live sessions of you building things, post sessions of you advising to people. Paraphrasing Nike, just post it.

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More posts to come about scaling a fractional CTO/C-level business, and growing it to a 7 figure company..